It is an ironic mystery that even Christians — and I mean the Christian hierarchical intelligentsia — don’t really believe what they teach. If Jesus was God’s One True Human Representation of Himself then the words He spoke were more than human teachings of lofty principles that would require lengthy diatribes by learned clerics in order for the laity to access them. They of a necessity are the very principles themselves. It’s as if in the process of discovering the “God particle” the quantum physicists heard it say, “A sower went forth to sow …”.
Having been blessed (or cursed–depending on my reaction to the particular remembrance) with an enhanced autobiographical memory I can see, hear and feel my childhood friends marvel at my total lack of belief in God. For these beautiful Roman Catholic children of post WW II Levittown filled with love, joy and hope God was real — Jesus loved them and Mary was smiling on them every day.
I would have none of it. I was being loyal to my parents who — and for the life of me at sixty I still cannot fathom how or why they resisted the sheer peer pressure to submit — hated God and the Church and anything that related to those things. I was told when I had asked why back then –in one of my earliest memories of processing the spoken word — that we were “different” and “smarter” then they.
To this day I am plagued by needing to prove my parents right. I cannot even be certain that this blog –dedicated to promoting belief in the Christian God of the Bible — is not really a further attempt to foster the agenda of the Tekula family who lived at the bottom of the little hill on the northwest corner of Bloomingdale Road and Gleaner Lane.
Today most of these kids I knew are not now active believers. In fact I am the most fervent Christian of all that I have come in contact with. And today I am having a sense — perhaps even an epiphany — as to what happened to them. From what I can gather from memory and conjecture they were being taught that what they were to be about with the gift of faith each had been given was to make the world a better place. Well — while certainly a different place from the culture of the mid-20th Century I don’t think many would call it better — especially from the point of view of a young person back then. I cannot blame any of them — me included — for the modern pervasive sense of frustration and confusion on that point.
Listening to the words of Jesus from the Gospels I can’t help but wonder where the idea of changing the world as a Heavenly agenda got into Christian Catholic catechism. Jesus spoke a parable about letting the weeds grow with the wheat lest in pulling up the “tares” you uproot some of the good growing crops. He taught directly not to put any hope in this world “where moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break in and steal.” The mistake all the followers — from those at the periphery to the twelve apostles themselves — made was to think that the Messiah of God had come to change their local world and from there spread the Kingdom of righteousness, justice and peace.
How could they believe such a thing having heard His words with their own ears? I’m thinking that we are all like toddlers who want the ice cream now even though Mommy said “Not until after you eat your dinner“….
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